Tuesday, 9 August 2016

Classic Rant: On The Movement to Ban Orcs

The Pseudoactivist-Swine have been on the march lately, what with wanting to shut down Mongoose for daring to have published the works of James Desboroughs several years ago; and after that trying to claim that Golarion is a racist game world (and therefore so is every regular RPG setting ever). But we should not forget their first target, the one that pretentious fucks have been attacking long before the Swine started to latch onto the desperate idea of making Fake Moral Outrage their new tool with which to subvert the hobby: the gentle Orc.

Yes, the Orc. But Pundit, you say, aside from peasants, 1st-3rd level adventurers and the occasional kobold, who has the Orc ever hurt? Well yes, precisely, but to the Pseudoactivist Swine, that orc is not an orc, you see; it's a secret code word that all gamers use for "black person", and when RPG gamers kill an orc, according to these Swine, they're secretly indulging in their desire to go out and commit racial genocide.

Their argument is amusingly fallacious: racists claim that people not of their skin colour are a savage and brutal cultural "other" that must be purged, an inhuman monstrosity that only seeks to destroy. The orc as presented in fantasy actually IS a savage and brutal inhuman monster that only seeks to destroy, therefore the pseudo-activists conclude gamers obviously must be thinking of non-whites when they think of orcs.

Part of the problem, if I were being generous, is that as mentally defective products of a relativist and culturally marxist education system, a lot of the Swine probably can't actually think in, visualize or understand archetypes; nor can they actually understand the idea of morality, of there actually being (even if only on the archetypal level) "good" and "evil". Their poisoned brains can't even understand the idea that it is in fact a virtue to seek to combat evil. When D&D PCs go out to kill orcs, they're not being used by their players as a vehicle for secret-racism, they're being used as an expression of ancient ritual in a completely modern format, to instill the moral lessons of how it's GOOD to fight evil, defend civilization, protect the innocent from harm, risk one's life for what's right... you know, all those things Swine don't believe in because of their moral-bankruptcy problem.

And in that light, you could create a very different narrative to the D&D "story": a multiracial group of courageous individuals from different backgrounds, genders, social classes, and levels of education putting aside all their differences, religious and non-religious, lily-white defenders of the law and those with a somewhat shady criminal past, country-folk and city-folk, all coming together in unity and collaborating in an autonomous (and usually non-hierarchical) collective, a fraternity with a common cause, often run by consensus, to save helpless innocents from the orcs. And it is the orcs, not the PCs or their players, who are greedy vicious racists that hate everything that isn't them and would destroy any chance for peaceful co-existence and the rule of law (that can only be brought about by civilization).

But somehow, that's never the narrative the Swine choose to see, is it? Elves and Dwarves coming together? No! It's just the hierarchical patriarchal racist sexist reactionary forces of capitalism daring to create a fun game that must be STOPPED at all costs, as far as they see it, and interspecies bromances be damned!

So here's a little secret, the real reason why the psuedoactivist Swine want to pick on Orcs: when you think about it, short of literally fighting a dragon in a dungeon (and occurring far more frequently in actual play) is there anything much more iconic, more typical, a better way to describe both D&D and therefore "RPG" itself in a single image, than a group of heroic adventurers going out to fight a band of vile orcs?

Of course not. And that's why they hate orcs. To the Swine, the orc doesn't really represent oppressed minorities, it represents people playing Regular RPGs, and that's what they want to destroy.

Alright then.More seriously, the rpg Shadow of the Demon Lord has an interesting take on orks, going back to Tolkien's concept of a race created for violence by a sorcerer, and yet it stays clear of moral absolutism. May be worth checking out.

Roleplays basic core is 'learning how to survive conflict' be it verbal, combat, traps, etc...

Would it be fair to say, At the core, being sexist/racist.. any -ist/-ism, is conflict, and their (of they/them) code mission is to ensure that conflict should not happen (because they were picked on as kids, and want to 'right' the world so it never happens again)..

So, RPGs are a source of conflict, therefore they don't want it to exist either?

So you could argue that they should not cause conflict, by trying to rid the world of -isms & -ists, because they are doing exactly what they preach they are trying to stop?

I think that's reading too much into it. They're just manipulative powermongers who hate regular RPGs and want to remake the hobby in their image; so that their pretentious pseudo-intellectual games can be forced on a captive public (the only way they could hope for them to ever do well).

well, thanks to you, Pundit, whenever I think of the Orcs from the old D&D cartoon, I automatically equate them with the swine of TBP.

Any time I watch the old cartoon and see those once proud warriors grunting out commands, I instead hear things like "Desborough's opinion triggers me and you need to respect that!" or "as a proud woman weighing 450 pounds, seeing the iconic sorceress from Pathfinder makes me feel like my body isn't perfect, so Pathfinder needs to change her so she more accurately reflects a normal woman, like myself."